Dr. Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1992 in Computer Science with minor from the Sloan School of Management. He is a Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Mathematics at UCLA and a director of the Multi-disciplinary Center of Information and Computation Security there. Dr. Ostrovsky came to UCLA from Telcordia Technologies, an SAIC subsidiary. Dr. Ostrovsky has published more than 120 papers in refereed journals and conferences and holds eight patents. He is a member of the editorial boards of Algorithmica, the Journal of Cryptology and the Journal of Information and Computer Security, where he also serves as on the advisory board. Dr. Ostrovsky is also a member of the steering committee of the international symposium of Security in Communication Networks (SCN). He was the Plenary Invited Speaker for Public Key Cryptography (PKC-2007) International Conference, 2007. He received 2008, 2007 and 2004 NSF CyberTrust Research Awards; 2006 and 2005 Xerox Corporate Innovation Faculty Award; 2006 IBM Faculty Award; 2006 Xerox Corporation Distinguished Lecture Series invited speaker; 2005 Distinguished Cryptographer of the Year Lecture Series NTT Labs, Japan; OKAWA Foundation 2004 Research Award; the 1993 Henry Taub Prize; the 1996 Bellcore prize for excellence in research; and three-time winner of the best published work of the year (1999, 2001, 2002) at SAIC in computer science and mathematics (SAIC is Telcordia's parent company with over 40,000 engineers and scientists). Dr. Ostrovsky is a co-Founder and board member of Stealth Software Technologies, a UCLA-based startup.

Dr. Ostrovsky will discuss HIDDEN QUERY TECHNOLOGY. A technology that allows one party to access and query others’ databases without revealing the specific question being searched for, while at the same time protecting the searched databases from improper transfer of data out of their databases. This unique combination of capabilities is important for many applications in intelligence and law enforcement, as well as for multi-agency and coalition operations. For the intelligence community, the technology allows users to execute classified queries on unclassified (or with a lower classification) machines without having to upload all data into a classified setting. The novel solution offers cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and timeliness, and provides a capability for the intelligence community to collect data without revealing sources and methods (or anything else) about the nature of the classified query. A key issue for multi-agency and coalition operations is how and when to share data. The ability to identify the existence of key data that needs sharing, while still protecting the data owners’ processes, sources and methods for release of the data, is a critically important capability for multi-agency and multi-nation operations. In this talk, I’ll survey the underlying mathematical ideas that make this technology possible and demonstrate the technology.